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Ancient Swords Made of Carbon Nanotubes
brian0918 writes "Nature reports that researchers at Dresden University believe that sabres from Damascus dating back to 900 AD were formed with help from carbon nanotubes. From the article: 'Sabres from Damascus are made from a type of steel called wootz. But the secret of the swords' manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century.' At high temperatures, impurities in the metal 'could have catalyzed the growth of nanotubes from carbon in the burning wood and leaves used to make the wootz, Paufler suggests. These tubes could then have filled with cementite to produce the wires in the patterned blades, he says.'"
So swords are a series of tubes too?
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
"But the secret of the swords' manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century."
Not anymore!
Look, this isn't really a 'mad loot' or 'MASSIVE DAMAGE' moment so please, so try to speak and write proper English.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
But I didn't know it was called "wootz". That's almost too good to be true. Next we'll find out the it's made of pwned ore.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
This, for instance, tells the story of old Damascan warriors that would run around slaying their enemies, and at each kill would shout a prayer of "W00Tz" to their ancient sword gods to thank them for their glorious victory.
but when do I get my Dragon's Tooth?
Suggest is the word. I think the author was smokin' the wacky tabaccy when he came up with this one.
Oh jesus christ, when will the carbon nano-tube apologists give it a rest? I swear, these guys are like string theorists crossed with Amiga enthusiasts.
All over IRC I see people typing w00tz! w00tz! And now I know they were really just referring to Damascus steel and carbon nanotubes. That makes a lot more...er...hmm...
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
... I've heard so far.
From my understanding the steel was hammered into very very thin sheets- of approximate shape- and then bundled. 30 to 50 of these sheets were then dipped in an carbon-iron fluxed solution at high temperature which was then 'wicked' between the plates by capillary action. Cooled and drop forged by any number of techinques the steel was work hardened and quenched, and provided the best of both world- steel's strength and hardness (sharpness), and the raw iron's fibrous flexibility.
As you know raw iron (no carbon) has packed fibres- you can see them as they rust away- but I have no idea if the fibres are that small...
Anyway... interesting theory.
Since the secret of manufacturing was lost in the 18th century, it would make sense that they were still made during 1500-1600. How would their properties in manufacturing compare to the folding method of the Japanese katana? Would the nanotubes be present in the katana as well, or was this unique to Damascus?
Fighting over religion is like seeing whose imaginary friend is best.
Ancient Astronauts teach Syrians secret nano-tube technology in 900 AD...
This just in: carbon nanotubes found in Amiga computers! Also, carbon nanotubes made of vibrating strings!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I've always had an unhealthy appreciation of pocket knives and have coveted one of these Boker Damascus steel models: https://www.bokerusa.com/images/1054DAMASCUS.jpg. I just can't see dropping > $500 on a knife to strip wires and sharpen pencils.
Maybe I'm mis-reading your post, but it sounds like you're thinking of pattern welding. The true damascus steel was produced in a different way from pattern welding. Because the of the similar appearance of the two steels, pattern welded blades are just called damascus steel nowadays.
With all these diluting words there's not much conclusive.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well, you could always go overboard on the Damascus and get one of these
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
A modern blade that would be considered unremarkable would be very good by most ancient standards. There are ancient Chinese stories of knives that were able to split iron rods that were being used as weapons. If I swing a steel bar at you and you split it with a knife, your knife may be good but my iron bar must be pretty bad. In fact, by most ancient standards a piece of rebar would be considered pretty formidable.
The other telling thing is that the Muslim warriors were dismayed by the protection provided by European armor. A Damascus blade might be amazingly effective against silk handkerchiefs and human flesh but not so much against other pieces of metal.
Neal Stephenson mentions this in the Baroque Cycle. He talks about how the little eggs of steel were forged in India and hammered out to make watered steel, then sold to the asian market. I assume he is talking about the same thing? I believe he even used the word "wootz", but I can't recall.
By these guys?
Or has their worked been made suspect or not confirmed?
Scientific American reported over a year ago that a metallurgist and a blacksmith managed to reproduce Damascus steel. The secret was in the Wootz. Wootz is a lump of iron that was produced at the mine, then exported. The folks in India didn't know how to make it into Damascus steel, the folks in Damascus did, but the process only worked with a wootz from one particular mine in India. The mine in India played out several hundred years ago. That's why the secret died, after being a state secret for over 1000 years. It stopped working.
According to the team SA reported on, the secret is in a small amount of molybdenum. the process of manufacture used up to 50 forgings, and used acids to etch designs into the blade. The forgings cause microscopically fine strands of molybdenum to be located throughout the steel, breaking up the crystaline structure, and with it the fracture points. This also caused the famous 'watermarks' that all true Damascus steel has.
As some nanotubes result from almost any coking process, there would be nanotubes in there, (vanishingly small quantities), but the strength would come from other things.
I understand that it is now possible to buy a new Damascus steel sword again, but the price is very high. (it always was.) A flying car might be cheaper.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
The making of Damascus steel was lost around 1750, but rediscovered around 2000. There's a nice article on the rediscovery referenced from one of the wikipedia pages.
Connor McLeod called, he thinks you have something that belongs to him... or at least to his friend Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez
*Makes a mental note of this word for the next scrabble game*
Kent Simon Multitheft Auto
I remember a post here on Slashdot about a pair of guys (A blacksmith and a metallurgist) from Florida I think who said the secret was merely related to a certain quantity of tungsten in the steel and pounding it *very hard*. If someone can dig out the link...
Mind the frickin' laser...
wootz is having a woot-off today!
You forgot it takes a healthy dose of Neutrinos to make the tubes fully form.
1. Make Damascus sword
2. Sneak sword into virtual world
3. ???
4. PROFIT!!!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Flooz?
Scientific American published the secret of Damascus steel back in 2000:
h art/classes/down_loads/damascus.pdf
http://www.mines.edu/Academic/met/pe/faculty/eber
As with most things in material science, the "secret" came down to the impurities.
The article concludes that there was never a "lost technique", it was merely a fluke that the source of their iron contained just the right type of impurities in the right amounts, to result in the incredible Damascus steel. Once that source was exhausted, the "technique" no longer seemed to work, and the "secret" was henceforth considered lost.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Almost every post on slashdot has an overlord joke with a +5 Funny rating. I'm waiting for the day when its not funny any more...
The wikipedia article says that Damascus steel was rediscovered in the 1980's, but I got to meet an ABS Master Bladesmith (there's less than 100 of them) several years ago (around 2001) and had the chance to heft in my hand what he said was the first hunk of real raw damascus steel that his friend (an ABS Master) had given to anyone since rediscovering the process.
So, from what I understand, we already know how to recreate the original style of Damascus steel aka wootz.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
In the article, John Verhoeven is given a small amount of space to relate his experiences with Wootz. As a matter of fact, both he and Al Pendray, a master Bladesmith from Florida, succeeded in rediscovering the methodology for creating Wootz "cakes," or ingots, that are in turn forged into blades. I had the pleasure of talking with Mr Pendray after a demonstration at the ABANA Conference in St Louis a number of years ago. He brought samples of the Wootz cakes and they are nothing like what you'd expect from an Ultra-High carbon steel. The carbon content in these ingots is higher than "cast Iron." Most cast Iron items, such as frying pans, are closer to cast Steel - possessing over a percent of Carbon in it. What was fascinating was seeing the forging process. Mr Pendray demonstrated some of the difficulties he encountered working the materials. He said that he had to unlearn traditional bladesmithing techniques, then create a process for working this stuff. During the demo, it became apparent why. The steel is not completely homogenous - in fact, it looked like wood with worm holes! These created a very entertaining forging challenge, as the material could begin to fall apart around these areas. Ultimately, what he and Verhoeven said was that the "watering" that people had thought was created by laminating steel was the way certain parts of the steel precipitated out. No doubting the cutting ability, though - this stuff makes a wickedly sharp blade. If anyone else is really curious, head on over to Google and search Al Pendray and Wootz together. Here's a sample... http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeve n-9809.html It's an amazing eye opener and, I think, one of the most important rediscoveries in modern times.
What on Earth do you mean, "any more"?
Maybe it's time for MythBusters to RE-revisit cutting a sword with a sword...
I, for one, do not welcome our eventual humorless overlords.
And when that day comes I for one will welcoe our humorless overlord rulers.....
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
It's all part of the vast right-wing conspiracy!
simple - the slashdot mod system is broken, funny posts get no positive karma. Thus, kind moderators will often mod a funny post as informative or insightful, so that the poster gets the karma.
this can really fuck you over, by the way, if you tell a controversial joke... get modded +5 funny, then get a -1, troll, and another funny, and another troll. When a moderation war kicks in, you keep losing karma from the -1 troll's and gain no positive karma from the +1 funny's. Eventually you could end up with a +5 post that cost you an assload of karma.
Sometimes Scientific American is just like /. - dupes and all.
Back in the 70's SA ran a similar article on Damascus steel. The authors (iircc, one was from Stanford) attributed the steel's property both to the impurities which this article talks about and to the heating/cooling cycles that gave the steel its strength. The article referenced an ancient blacksmith's poem that described the various colors the steel had to take as it was heated and cooled. Since the poet didn't have a Pantone color palette available, he compared the colors to the sun and moon at various times of the day and year. Heaven help the color-blind or weak memoried blacksmith.
One last point that I remember from the article was a discussion of the quenching fluids. For the final quenching, the poem describes killing a slave by driving the steel into his chest. The authors, noting the current shortage of slaves, concluded that a saline solution held at 98 degrees Fahrenheit was the salient factor in the quenching fluid.
I was wondering where the tem 'w00t' came from, lol. Obviously they took that from the Damascans as well as the Carbon swords from the Phantasy Star series on good old Sega Genesis. Must be the basis for a +1 sword in D&D too. So what's Drizzt Du Erden's +5 scimitar based on in reality you ask? Well that's simple, it's a carbon nanotube enhanced, antimatter bladed, quantum slash enhanced, electric current carrying, Ruby on Rails using blade :)
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Actualy, the best samurai swords were made from iron bearing sands once found in Japanese rivers. One theory has the iron for Damascus coming from similar deposits in India. The unique impurities (in both cases) added to the special properties of the blades.
So pwning for wootz iron for a 1337 sword actualy makes sense.
I find it hard to believe that a normal furnace is hot enough to produce carbon nanotubes. Currently CNTs have to be manufactured using plasma torches. in a normal furnace, there will be too many defects in the CNTs for them to be of any use.
No, this means that the internet is far older than we thought.
And, therefore, Al Gore is far older than we thought.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
I'm waiting for the day when its not funny any more...
You missed it already. See, it gets not-funny after awhile, and then using it becomes the joke itself and so it is made funny again, only to eventually be over-used and become not funny again. Repeat until the sun goes nova.
I, for one, welcome our overlord-disparaging overlords.
I, for one, welcome our new overlord-joke hating overlords...
As the Slashdot Faq says: Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma. You have to be smart, not just a smart-ass.
If you want to give someone Karma and the post doesn't fit into the Insightful or Interesting category, use +1 Underrated.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Wootz, Damascus or Watered Steel was made famous (well, to those who didn't already know anyway) in Burton's Arabian Nights by the following passage:
"Watered steel-blade, the world perfection calls,
Drunk with
the viper poison foes appals,
Cuts lively, burns the blood whene'er it falls;
And picks up
gems from pave of marble halls;"
This is not the only thing we lost, but there are many more things (Medicines, etc.). I am afraid, nowadays we are not intelligent enough to find those things. Do you thing Multi-core Tera-flop processors can equal those things? no. never.
Either that, or he's confused about basic smithing. The basic idea behind a sword is that you beat the shit out of the edge while it's cooling to form hard, brittle martensite while the rest of the body forms as soft pearlite to avoid cracking. Then there's the L6 bainite supersword, which is just nuts.
It's broken by design - people can and do make stupid shitty decisions. That doesn't make it any less broken.
>> simple - the slashdot mod system is broken, funny posts get no positive karma.
> That's not a bug, it's a feature.
The way it is implimented, it is a bug.
It has only happend to me once, and only by 1 point, but it is annoying to lose Karma for a post that has a flat or net positive moderation.
+Funny should only be zeroed to the degree that the final score is the same as the starting score.
Last time I checked wootz was made in the middle ages, which were preceded by the classical era, which was preceded in turn by ancient times, which were preceded by prehistoric times.
If you want to give someone Karma and the post doesn't fit into the Insightful or Interesting category, use +1 Underrated.
And if you want to unjustifiably mod someone down because you disagree with them, and not have the moderation reviewed in metamoderation, use -1 Overrated.
Which is probably not what it was intended for.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
"...and with one innocently-typed line, Y.A.B. accidentally founded an evil online cult which would one day grow to plunge the whole earth into a reign of darkness..."
heh.
sWord origins? Nice one.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
I remember reading something about this in Popular Science a few years ago (like 4-5). They had this guy, who used ground glass and other forms of carbon in his steel, and a unique forging process, to eventually replicate Damascus steel. It was really cool, really cool looking, and just as sharp and durable as those legendary blades of yesteryear.
The forging process was something about forging and reforging until the heat drew trace elements of carbide to the surface and eventually to the edge, where they would be immensely hard and sharp, and with acid, form a beautiful finish. Very cool!
Read the only personal Runyon page out there.
In Soviet Russia, swords turn you into nanotubes...
While later Japanese swords were made by forging different metals together, very early swords were not--they were forged from a solid piece of steel. The steel was beaten flat and folded over itself several times, but it was not to impart mechanical qualities--it was to mix the carbon evenly throughout the impure metal. (Later this was accomplished through better steel manufacturing, so the folding was replaced by the multi-part welding of of different alloys as described.)
o ldid=69002423
Once the sword was shaped it was quenched. However since they wanted different properties on the edge vs. the spine, they needed to cool the different parts at different rates. This was accomplished by painting the sword with varying thicknesses of clay--thick on the back for a slow quench (resulting in soft but springy steel) and thin on the edge for a fast quench (resulting in hard but brittle martensite). This differential cooling also caused some of the curvature. It also allowed a sword maker to impart a "signature" of sorts, by painting patterns into the clay. This manifests itself in the subtle wavy reflective pattern seen along the cutting edge of many katanas, called the hamon.
Finally to address the GP, the original pattern that is now called Damascus had nothing to do with folding the blade. If you look at an original Damascus blade the pattern is not alligned to the edge but runs throughout the blade. It has more to do with the steel composition and how it was forged.
Sources for more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Katana&
http://www.mines.edu/Academic/met/pe/faculty/ eberhart/classes/down_loads/damascus.pdf (PDF)
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Crush you enemies. See them driven before you. Enjoy the lamantation of the women.
Reports of the secret of Damascus steel being redicovered date back to no-one-remembers-when. Russian Anosov reportedly re-created the famous Bulat steel back in the first half of XIX century. The problem is that no one really knows whether Bulat steel is the same as Damascus steel. As well as no one really knows what the more-or-less exact properties of Damascus steel really were.
There's an old joke in my family, "it was a brave diner who found out that frogs' legs are edible."
But who the heck would have been inspired to plunge their newly forged blade into the body of a still-living slave? Did he just try it once in a fit of rage?
Repeat until the sun goes nova.
Or you could simulate this by pouring hot grits down your pants.
the comment settings page, where you can assign -6 to Funny comments and never have to have your reading interrupted by them again!
So what happens to my Karma if I constantly post dupes and sensational journalism instead of........... oh.....
In fact, your explanation of the process is a tad wrong... here comes an explanation closer to reality
For simple carbon steels, beating the shit out of the edge just gives it its basic shape (it will be refined later at the polish stage). The formation of bainite, martensite and pearlite is caused by the cooling rate. Thus they come from the quenching and subsequent tempering of the blade. The tempering is mainly there to relieve the internal stresses caused by the structure reorganisation triggerred by the quench (and reduce the hardness by a few Rockwell points). Basically (very simplified), a fast cooling rate will give you pearlite while a slower cooling rate will give you martensite and if you keep it a long time at the correct temperature, you'll end up with bainite.
A prime example of that concept is the way japanese swords are made (oversimplified once more, as this is not a smithing forum).
After you've given a basic edge shape to the blade, you apply clay on the edge (and a bit on the spine, too) then you bring the whole blade to non-magnetic temperature and you quench it. Three things can happen at that point:
- the blade curves towards the back (due to the different cooling rates) and the crystalline structure changes (martensite and friends under the clay, pearlite where there is no clay)
- the blade curves towards the edge (can happen with 5160 quenched in oil), it's a miss
- the blade cracks due to the stress (you used the wrong quenching medium for your alloy or heated the blade too much)
If the blade survived, you can then temper it by bringing it back to a certain temperature (depending on the alloy) so the internal stresses are relieved and the surface crystalline structure can change a bit too (if the temp is in the correct range). After that, the smith gives the a very rough polish before sending it to a real polisher.I do agree about the L6 bainite swords by HC, they are amazing ;) L6 in itself is just a tooling alloy (used for saw blades, IIRC), the properties of the L6 swords come from the controlled temperatures of the salt baths used by Howard. He is keeping the blades at a very precise temperature range for a certain amount of time to maximise the reorganisation of the crystalline structure to bainite. I don't haved the temperature graphs for various structures handy, but they're quite easy to find on the web ;)
And somebody wasted a mod point on this... I wish people would learn not to down but up moderate. Far more useful I think.
wootz.com is already taken.
There's no living in my life anymore
...
The seas have gone dry
And the rain's stopped falling
Please don't you cry any more
Can't you see
Listen to the breeze
Whisper to me please
Don't send me to the path of nevermore
?
Yeah, I meant to reply to myself and forgot. I'd give you my upmods if I could. Still, you reversed one thing: the shearing caused by fast cooling produces martensite, not pearlite. Bainite (I think) is produced by fast cooling down to some intermediate temperature followed by slow cooling.
I, for one, welcome our eventual humorless overlords.
A beowulf cluster of those?
Indeed I got martensite and pearlite mixed up ;)
TTT diagrams are a good starting point for those who might be interested in the subject. Figure 5 shows the process for bainite transformation of austenite.
In Soviet Russia, Overlord welcomes YOU!
All you need is lurv.
Step aside, Seleucid warriors, here comes the almighty Damascan army. They've been raiding hard these past few months and I hear they've downed quite a few baddies. They've all got some new purple weapon that you losers can only dream about (some nanotube sword, +15 to all attributes).
You do have a choice. Tune funny modifier to -5 and you'll not have to deal with moderators' sense of humor anymore.
I did this when I read a post about some tragedy on Slashdot (I really don't remember what it was) and there was a silly geek joke from an arcade title. It was moderated as funny.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
The Right of Congress to make laws regarding Intellectual Property is in the Body of the Constitution Proper. In Article 1, "The legislative powers of Congress", Section 8: Congress (and only congress) shall have the power to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
To see if there really is damascene wootz steel in that plane you'd need to etch it with acid and rub the surface with Fe3(?)Cl to make the typical damascene bands appear. Since this plane is flying way over your head it is impossible to see if it is made from wootz. However since this 747 is most likely made from aluminium instead of steel one can apply Occams razor (that for this time is made from damascened wootz) and conclude that it is not.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Spot on. I should correct the bit about forging though - working the metal at those temperatures still introduces a lot of dislocations that don't all go away with the heat or have a large influence on grain size in the finished material - both of which increase the strength.
Come on now - the technique was never lost - we just have easier ways of getting the same results now. The same sort of technique was done on a relatively large scale for small artillery peices in Japan as late as 1905 - but it is a lot of hard work when we can get similar results just with the right heat treatment and a bit of forging. First year enginnering students get told in general terms how to make damascus steel and the materials science students get a bit more detail later on.
"I'm waiting for the day when its not funny any more..."
I hope you believe there's life after death.
I don't know about anyone else, but when I'm reading about a tradgedy is when I jack that funny modifier up a little bit.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Surely the funniness cycle is more a sine wave than a binary 1 or 0 with funniness on the y axis and time on the x...
"BSD is dead" - definitely bottoming out, may rise soon
"Geeks never meet women genre" - topped out a few weeks ago, and heading down again
"Overlords" - somewhere around 0, downward trend
"In soviet Russia" - hot prospect, tipped to rise again soon
I think Verhoeven got it right. Read all about it at http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeve n-9809.html.
I aim to misbehave.
The thing about muslim swords and european armours is a different story altogether, and it's about the shape of the sword rather than the metal.
Let's focus on two aspects:
1. The edge. There are two basic moves for _cutting_ with a sword:
A) draw cut. No, it's not the Iai maneuver, but dragging the edge along as you cut. Sorta like what most people do when they cut a slice of bread or of salami with a knife. Curved swords are ideal for draw cuts, straight swords suck for it.
Draw cuts are deadly against unarmoured opponents, and can cut through flesh like a hot knife through butter. Draw cuts, on the other hand suck against metal armour. Even the cheapest chain hauberk makes a scimitar or katana completely useless.
B) hard square hits, much like with an axe or mace. Here you don't draw the edge to slice, but just hit hard and let the kinetic energy drive the edge into the opponent. Straight swords are perfect for it, curved swords much less so.
This hacking move is actually very nice against armour, especially chain. Even if it doesn't penetrate, you're being bludgeoned with a 3 pound steel bar with a very narrow edge. Even the maille and the padding under it can only spread it over so much surface. So even if it doesn't penetrate, it can break a rib or two, or crack a skull.
2. The tip. Here we actually have three cases, if we also include the katana.
a) straight sword, tappered tip. (I.e., the european swords.) A straight sword is ideal for piercing _accuracy_ and strength since it's basically a short spear. (See for example the later estoc which was basically more of a short spear than a sword by now.) You can aim pretty well and put all your strength behind that tip, because the force goes along the axis of that bar.
b) curved sword, tappered tip. (I.e., the muslim swords that you mentioned.) Again this becomes a lot less useful against armoured opponents, since you have neither the accuracy (e.g., for thrusting between two plates) nor as much strength in a strictly piercing hit.
c) curved tip. (E.g., the Japanese Katana or the Chinese Dao.) This is a special kind of tip that is outright useless at piercing against an armoured opponent, but great at cutting. The most fearsome cuts with a katana are done with the tip. It's a tip that emphasizes not only cutting power, but range. (Your outer range with the weapon is also the range at which you are the deadliest.) The range fits well with the Samurai techniques which emphasise, basically, striking first over defense. (By comparison, in european fencing _the_ focus was defense, and harming the opponent was second priority.)
Unfortunately this too is useless against metal armour, which is why the Katana became _the_ symbol of the Samurai only after firearms made armour obsolete. (Much like the Rapier and the Smallsword in Europe.) Prior to that, the bow and spear were the preferred weapons.
So to make a long story short: the reason the muslims had trouble against the crusaders was because the turkish/arabic curved swords sucked against heavily armoured opponents.
Basically, unrelated, this is why it gets on my nerves to hear so many manga fans repeat stuff like that the european swords were crap and only used because of some religious reasons. For the fighting style they were used in, and the reality of European warfare at the time, a straight sword was actually a great weapon.
And it's also worth remembering that it wasn't just the Europeans, but also, for example, the Chinese that favoured the longsword. While the curved-tip Dao (broadsword) was the weapon given to common troops, the nobles and elites used the Jian (straight longsword) as a more effective weapon in the hands of a highly trained elite. And as a status symbol.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I, for one, welcome our actually funny overlords.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Actually, if you read a bit about Wootz, a.k.a. Damascus Steel, it was:
A) able to hold a very sharp edge. (In addition to being ductile, elastic, and generally not going to crack when you hit around with it in combat.) So in fact they were pretty much "MASSIVE DAMAGE" swords. Think a +5 Keen sword.
B) rare and uber-expensive. Among other things, because there were few people who could make one _and_ it only worked with imported ore from one particular mine in India. So if you managed to loot one of these, damn right it would count as Phat Lewt.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"The tubes were only revealed after a piece of sword was dissolved in hydrochloric acid to remove another microstructure in the swords: nanowires of the mineral cementite."
Am I missing something or did they just say they're dissolving priceless swords in hydrochloric acid?
Overlord jokes aren't funny anymore... in Japan!
I, for one, will welcome our cyclic retro overlords, as long as they bring back slinkys too
which is totally what she said
This is a great summary that my fantasy sword loving ass knew nothing about...
Yes, because of course slashdot is completely beyond feedback or criticism. If its in the FAQ it must the only way to do it.
I wonder how many other undiscovered technology advances are collecting dust in a museum because we havent [re-]invented it yet. This also goes for materials from UFOs, meteors from other planets (good candidates for Mars and Moon), and so on.
I think the only news here is that "scientists apply the term 'nanotubes' to an ancient process that was rediscovered several decades ago."
I got a kick out of Daniel as I asked about the no-breakage/replacement guarantee.
Me: So if Bubba Redneck ticks me off, I hack into his truck's engine block and the blade breaks, you'll replace it?
Daniel: I doubt it would break, but if it does, yeah, we'll replace it.
I guess it's comforting that science and the media confirms something we Ren Faire geeks have known for years: ancient science is better, and modern science is only rediscovering what has been lost.
You misspelled "humourless".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I, for one, welcome our new nova-surviving overlords.
Personally I think that laughter/humor is one of our best tools for dealing with adversity. Why cry when you can laugh? I hope when I die people have a hell of a wake, get shitfaced and end up wearing a policewoman's suspenders and a traffic cone on their head, shit like that, instead of standing around crying about how I'm gone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Maybe we should have a clichés market where we can invest mod points in our favorites and reap the rewards. We can put the ticker below the Slashdot Poll.
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
Am I missing something or did they just say they're dissolving priceless swords in hydrochloric acid?
You got it -- dissolving priceless swords, in the name of Science.
On the upside, the hydrochloric acid used in the process is now similarly priceless -- the world's only hydrochloric acid containing genuine Damascus steel.
I'll bet that even Holy Water from the River Jordan can't compete, in that specialized auction-house category known as Priceless Neo-Medieval Fluids.
-kgj
-kgj
Step aside, Seleucid warriors, here comes the almighty Damascan army. They've been raiding hard these past few months and I hear they've downed quite a few baddies. They've all got some new purple weapon that you losers can only dream about (some nanotube sword, +15 to all attributes).
This deserves +funny moderation, but mainly I'm impressed to see the name Seleucid used meaningfully.
-kgj
-kgj
It's like discovering a 747 hundreds of years before the Wright brothers flew!
Oh, great. Now carbon nanotubes turn into the XML of molecular chemistry.
"Hey, we need a material with $PROPERTY."
"Just use carbon nanotubes."
"Genius!"
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
But who the heck would have been inspired to plunge their newly forged blade into the body of a still-living slave? Did he just try it once in a fit of rage?
That old stab-the-slave test reveals nothing.
You need to swing the sword good and hard against an essentially immoveable object -- say, the basalt-block wall of a Crusader's castle. If the blade breaks, the steel was not Damascus. (If the sword pierces the castle wall, the basalt wasn't very good basalt.)
-kgj
-kgj
Excellent literary reference, thanks!
-kgj
-kgj
Verhoeven is the man on this stuff. He and Pendray went head to head with some eggheads from either Caltech or Stanford on the whole rolling explanation for Wootz and knocked them on their ass. There's a big difference between a "tube like" structure and an actual carbon nanotube especially using a TEM or S/TEM. Speaking as a microscopist this explanation sounds kind of far-fetched. People see new and weird things with the TEM 95% of the time that doesn't mean it's what they say it is. I'd need to read a peer reviewed journal and see what they are actually seeing before I would buy into this.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
How does this compare to swords by Angel Sword, particularly those made with techno wootz? AFAIK, Daniel still holds the record for cutting through the most mats.
False. I have been present personally during demonstrations which included creating and testing pattern-welded blades. Comparisons were made to similarly forged and tempered billets and the layered metal took more force to deform and more force to break. You can overforge the steel, you can thin out the layers too much, you can get large or non-carboniferous inclusions, all of which will result in a flawed or brittle blade, but properly forged pattern-welded steel is stronger and stiffer than plain hammered metal of the same type. This is presumably because of the carbon structures that are created during the welding and hammering out; most smiths will need to use a coal fire rather than a gas forge (I've heard that super-duper experts can pattern-weld with gas and carbon-loaded fluxes, but I've never seen anyone do it successfully).
You are overhyping Japanese swordcraft at bit, also - certainly Japanese blades and bladesmiths deserve their reputation, but there's nothing magical about their particular form of pattern-welding, and for a big European-type like me a Viking pattern-welded blade might be more useful and appropriate. The Norse cable-welded core does not create the weak flanks that characterize the japanese method; Miyamoto Musashi was famous for smashing katanas with a wooden sword, but he wouldn't have been able to do it to a Viking longsword.
IIRC, the sun's eventually supposed to go supernova, not nova. They're different phenomena.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
That's not a bug, it's a feature. As the Slashdot Faq says: Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma. You have to be smart, not just a smart-ass.
/. is one of the funniest sites out there. I mean, it's like Playboy -- who reads it for the articles?
That's kind of a shame considering that
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Uh, no, not really. It makes for a good (if bullshit) anti-science position, but in practice, ancient/medieval science was mostly a bunch of hocus-pocus, con-artistry and revisionist history.
E.g., if you're gonna make such broad claims as "ancient science is better", how about medicine? May I point out that, since you mention "ren faire", during renaissance the tendency for any city's population was to die off of disease and any city needed a steady supply of immigrants from the country side just to maintain its size? I don't just mean the recurring black death epidemics, but even in between them. The cities were that filthy, being overcrowded didn't help either, and "medicine" was that useless at the time.
You'd actually be more likely to die in a hospital than if left untreated. If they didn't bleed you to death, they'd give you fun stuff like mercury. See examples from Ivan The Terrible's treatment with mercury to the first chinese emperor, Shi Huangdi, accidentally posioned with a too high dose of mercury-based pills by his doctors. There are some two millenia or so between the two. That's medieval and ancient medical science at its finest, really.
E.g., it's easy to take nowadays' food controls and pasteurization and refrigeration for granted, but in the middle ages and renaissance what you'd eat wasn't quite the "bio" foods you have today. There are plenty of cases where the meat of cattle which died of anthrax was cheerfully sold to the cities... with the consequences you'd expect. (Hint: it starts with "de" and ends with "ath.";) And if that wouldn't get you, there are a ton of other diseases and parasites that were quite common in meat. (E.g., look up Trichinella. The larvae in meat are not reliably killed by curing, drying or smoking.)
Not to mention bacteria, since without refrigeration and never enough salt for the thousands of pigs slaughtered at christmas, a lot of the meat was eaten anywhere between slightly spoiled and practically rotten. (Fun bit of trivia: that's one reason why spice trade was as good as a licence to print money. Enough spices could make it less obvious that you're eating rotten meat. The bacteria could kill you anyway, though.)
E.g., if you're so keen on renaissance warfare and weapons, may I remind you that more soldiers died of dysentery than of all weapons combined? It was a major cause of mortality during, say, the 100 years war. Much as everyone remembers that one for the longbow, dysentery actually killed more soldiers in that war than actual battle did. Even kings died of it occasionally. E.g., in that period, Henry V.
E.g., using lead for anything from cups and dishes to hair dye? Yeah, that's a fun bit of ancient technology. (It's used all the way from ancient egyptians to renaissance and beyond.) Too bad its toxic.
Etc.
Even as sword technology goes, Wootz was something discovered accidentally and which they never understood. E.g., they didn't know _why_ only ore from one particular Indian mine works there. And when that mine ran out of ore, the whole process just up and died because noone actually understood the process enough to make it work with anything else. Yeah, science at its finest... NOT.
The modern science didn't just rediscover something that the ancients knew, it discovered what the ancients _didn't_ know to start with: why and how that works, and how to do it without the magical ore from India.
So, please... if you want to believe in some romanticized version of Renaissance, go ahead. But realize that that's a romanticized/idealized thing that conveniently ommits all the thousands of bad aspects of life back then. It's like having a Hell Faire where you pretend that Hell is just a warm sunny beach resort. That disconnected from reality.
Fair enough
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Huh?
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(psst this it your chance to point out a third time and really take the cake!
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Broken by design? I didn't know the mod system was DRMd.
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[Fie on thee, infidel!]
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8 o o
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Damascus steel was made by pattern welding two specific materials together which were both fairly useless on their own but together produced a material better for that purpose than SOME produced today. It gets used as a classic example of what can be done with low temperature furnaces and high carbon cast iron plus sponge iron where you don't have the heat for melting unless you hit the iron and beat the impurities out of it - increasing pressure depressess the melting point.
What is new here is the influence of very small very hard inclusions in the hard material is being discussed - the same mechanism that gives some of the high strength aluminium alloys only in this case it is metal carbides and possibly very small graphite inclusions.
It is very hard work from with a hard to get material, but the technique is understood and is no wisdom of the ancients crystal gazing stuff lost forever.
There are better articles to read on the subject - a lot of introductory materials science books will have references to them because this material is such a good example of alloy design.
For people who actually speak English, yes...
My father has on many occasions mentioned how, after he dies, he would like to have the funeral ceremony, then, everyone hits the pub - taking the coffin with us, standing it up in the bar (open or not, our choice!) and having a final drink with him!!
I've always been dubious about his sanity...
I think that was how the froze Han Solo in the carbonite Nanotubes too!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)